When we think of defamation, we typically think of words: a slanderous remark, a libelous article, a defamatory social media post. But in Hopkins v. Ryan, Record No. 1192-25-3 (Va. Ct. App. June 23, 2026), the Court of Appeals of Virginia reminded us that defamation can take forms far removed from the spoken or written word. In a published opinion by Judge Raphael, the court reversed the dismissal of a defamation claim based not on any statement in the conventional sense, but on a fabricated invoice. The court held that a false business document, doctored to be attributed to the plaintiff and published to a third party to destroy his professional reputation, can constitute actionable defamation under Virginia law.
The facts alleged in the amended complaint paint a picture of workplace sabotage. David Hopkins worked as a commission-only sales representative for Consolidated Electrical Distributors, Inc. (“CED”), an electrical wholesale-distribution company. Dan Ryan was his direct supervisor at CED’s Roanoke office. Hopkins had spent years building customer relationships and earning commissions, and one of his largest accounts was a client identified in the complaint as “Company C.” Hopkins had earned more than $100,000 in commissions from Company C and had secured its commitment to a $1.8 million apartment-development project — a deal that would have generated substantial additional commissions for him.
According to the amended complaint, the relationship between Hopkins and Ryan deteriorated during the COVID-19 pandemic over disagreements about personal health decisions. Ryan allegedly developed a “malicious animus” toward Hopkins and devised a plan to ruin him economically and damage his professional reputation. Beginning in the fall of 2022, Ryan began transferring Hopkins’s high-paying accounts to himself. Then, in January 2023, Ryan allegedly executed the core of his scheme: he caused a shipment of new parts to Company C to be replaced with used, defective parts, and he created a false purchase document—an invoice bearing product codes and quantities for new inventory, not the defective goods actually shipped—that was linked to Hopkins by its invoice number. Ryan published this forged document to Company C, intending it to be perceived as Hopkins’s work product. The scheme worked. Believing Hopkins was responsible for the defective shipment, Company C cut ties with him entirely. Its management told employees they would be fired if they purchased anything from CED through Hopkins.
Hopkins sued Ryan for tortious interference with business expectancy and defamation. The trial court sustained Ryan’s demurrer on both counts, finding among other things that the false invoice was not a defamatory statement, did not satisfy the requirement that defamatory words be pleaded verbatim, did not refer to Hopkins, and carried no defamatory “sting.” The Court of Appeals reversed on all grounds.
On the threshold question of whether a fabricated document can even constitute defamation, the court engaged in a thorough historical analysis. Drawing on Blackstone’s Commentaries, Judge Raphael observed that libel was never limited to printed or written words but also encompassed “pictures, signs, and the like” that tend to diminish a person’s reputation. The court traced this principle through a line of early English cases. In Austin v. Culpeper (1683), a defamation judgment was upheld based on a drawing of a pillory with a notation identifying the plaintiff. In Bolton v. Deane, the actionable conduct was carrying a figure with horns and bowing at the plaintiff’s door (implying he was a cuckold). And in Jefferies v. Duncombe (1809), placing a lamp outside the plaintiff’s home to suggest it was a brothel was held to be defamatory, with Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough reasoning that the lamp served the same “purpose of defaming” as if the defendant had stood in front of the house and declared the same thing aloud.
Virginia inherited this broad understanding of defamation through its reception of the English common law, codified at Virginia Code § 1-200. The court cited Virginia’s own early authority: Judge Roane’s observation in Faulkner v. Alderson (1821) that a defamation action may be based on “speaking, writing, signs, or pictures,” and the Supreme Court of Virginia’s elaboration in Moss v. Harwood (1904) that defamation may proceed on “signs, pictures, or effigies, or the like.” The Restatement (Second) of Torts embraces the same tradition, defining a defamatory communication to include not just written or printed words but “any other form of communication that has the potentially harmful qualities characteristic of written or printed words.” The court noted that under the Restatement, a defamatory communication need not even be verbal; “it is enough that the communication is reasonably capable of being understood as charging something defamatory.”
The court also addressed the related principle that falsely attributing a communication to the plaintiff can itself be defamatory. Citing Tharpe v. Saunders and the New York Court of Appeals’ decision in Ben-Oliel v. Press Publishing Co., the court recognized that false attribution “may result in injury to reputation because the manner of expression or even the fact that the statement was made indicates a negative personal trait.” Here, Ryan allegedly designed the false invoice to be “passed off as the work product of Hopkins,” communicating the idea not only that Hopkins had prepared it but that he was incompetent.
Two additional aspects of the defamation holding merit attention. First, the court held that including a photograph of the false invoice in the amended complaint satisfied Virginia’s longstanding requirement that a defamation plaintiff plead the exact defamatory words. Second, the court rejected the trial court’s conclusion that the invoice carried no defamatory “sting,” observing that a communication imputing that a salesman promised new goods and delivered defective ones plainly prejudices him in his trade. The court noted the well-established principle that statements prejudicing a person in his profession or trade are actionable as defamation per se, though it left the per se determination for remand on a more developed record.
Hopkins v. Ryan establishes that the medium of a defamatory communication is essentially irrelevant. What matters is whether the communication, in whatever form it takes, conveys a false and reputation-damaging idea about the plaintiff to a third party.